Maureen Howard


Maureen Theresa Howard was an American novelist, memoirist, and editor. Her award-winning novels feature women protagonists and are known for formal innovation and a focus on the Irish-American experience.
A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, she was educated at Smith College. In addition to her work as an author, she had a career in academia, teaching writing and literature at several institutions, including Yale University and Columbia University.
Howard's books explore the role of family, class, the way that history informs personal identity, the experience of women in American society, and Catholicism in the lives of Irish Americans. Among other awards, her work garnered the National Book Critics Circle Award and three nominations for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Biography

Early life

Howard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on June 28, 1930. Her father, William L. Kearns, was an Irish immigrant who worked as a detective in Fairfield County, where he was assigned to the Harold Israel case. Her mother, Loretta, was a homemaker and the daughter of an Irish immigrant who amassed a fortune from land development and owning an asphalt plant. Howard credited her mother with exposing her to fine arts, enrolling her in lessons for ballet, piano, and elocution, in contrast to the experience with her father. Because of the family's economic situation, Howard went to work in the local public library at age sixteen.

Education and marriage

Howard attended Smith College, graduating in 1952. Howard was often critical of her education at Smith, which was at that time still very much delivering a genteel and sanitized education for women, but she continued to be connected to her alma mater. After graduation, she worked in advertising and then married Daniel F. Howard in 1954. He was a professor of English at Williams College and Kenyon College before joining Rutgers University in 1960, where he eventually chaired the English department. The couple had one child, a daughter. Howard's first marriage ended in divorce in 1967 and she married David J. Gordon the following year. Like Howard's first husband, Gordon was a college professor. Her marriage to David J. Gordon ended in divorce. In 1981, she married lawyer, stockbroker, and fellow novelist Mark Probst. He died in 2018.

Career

In 1960, Howard published her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales, which drew on her familiarity with academia to tell the story of a professor who decides to abandon family, job, and country while on sabbatical in Italy. The novel, first published in the United Kingdom before an American edition appeared in 1962, did not attract a large readership, but it impressed critics. In The New York Times, Martin Levin called it "delicious" and "cool". In later years, notable critics expressed admiration for it. Among these were Doris Grumbach, the literary editor of The New Republic, who said the novel "convinced through the originality of its parts … the writing, the creation of memorable characters". Celebrating it in The New York Times in 1982, Anatole Broyard said it was "pleasingly full of life and fine details".
Howard's second novel, Bridgeport Bus, appeared in 1965. Structured as a series of journal entries, it tells the story of an Irish-American woman who escapes her hometown of Bridgeport for New York City, where she pursues an independent life. Kirkus Reviews praised it as "filled with abrasive, abusive insights and observations and a wicked humor". Writing in The New York Times, Levin praised Howard's "blend of wit, impeccable style, and humanity". Like her first novel, it did not attract a large readership, but over time critics came to hold it in high regard. Remarking on it in The Washington Post in 1982, Grumbach called it "one of the most astutely funny novels of our time", while, a decade later, the scholar and critic Noel Perrin said it was "stunningly good". In 2001, the critic John Leonard lamented that it had been "published a couple of years too early" to benefit from the attention paid to second-wave feminism, despite being a "feminist novel".
During the late 1960s Howard began her teaching career. Continuing into the 1970s she taught literature, drama, and creative writing at, among others, The New School for Social Research; University of California, Santa Barbara, and City University of New York.
In 1974, Howard's third novel, Before My Time, was published to critical acclaim. Writing in The New York Times, Grumbach called Howard an "extraordinarily talented writer" and the novel a "further display of her sane, evocative, simple, and exact prose". Kirkus Reviews wrote that it was "a real book…written with both intelligence and feeling". She followed it in 1977 with a book on American women writers that she edited. The critic Gary Davenport said her introduction to that book "is the most intelligent treatment of women's literature that I have seen or expect ever to see".
Howard's next book was a memoir, Facts of Life, which some scholars have regarded as among her best work. Rather than tell her life story chronologically, it is organized into sections by theme. Initial reviews of the book were mostly positive. The novelist Diane Johnson, writing in The New York Times, praised the "excellence" of the writing, even as she wished the book had more "narrative coherence". Writing in The Hudson Review, Davenport thought the book "strangely uneven" but "highly effective". Kirkus Reviews called the book "a successful search for form and a flawless skewering of personality in glistening language". In The New Republic, Alfred Kazin praised it as "a ruthlessly personal story" told with "sheer novelistic skill". The book went on to win a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978.
During this period, Howard lectured at Brooklyn College as well as The New School for Social Research.
In Publishers Weekly, Sybil Steinberg speculated that Howard's next novel, Grace Abounding, could be her "breakthrough book", but the novel received mixed reviews. While Ada Long, writing in The New York Review of Books, praised it as "gentler and more convincing" than Howard's previous work, Broyard dismissed it in The New York Times as a "baffling" near failure. Kirkus Reviews also criticized it as "another family-life mosaic that doesn't quite add up". The novel still received a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as did Howard's next two novels, Expensive Habits and Natural History. The latter, which takes place in Howard's native Bridgeport, received praise in Publishers Weekly as "a compelling tour de force" that "places Howard squarely among the outstanding practitioners of late 20th-century fiction". The author John Casey, writing in The New York Times, compared reading Natural History to "watching a display of the Aurora Borealis." Irving Malin, in Commonweal, admired the "brilliant" novel's "maze of meaning".
Howard joined the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in 1993. She had previously been an instructor at Columbia's School of General Studies in the 1980s. She then began to write a quartet of books inspired by the four seasons: A Lover's Almanac, The Silver Screen, and The Rags of Time, and the collection of novellas called Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring. In 2010, reflecting on all of the books as a "great sequence-novel in four parts", the critic Sophia Lear, writing in The New Republic, praised them as "a beautifully integrated whole" whose "real subject" is "the artistic endeavor itself". Other reviews were mixed. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Caroline Fraser criticized the quartet's "almost cartoonish" treatment of its characters, which, she believed, resulted from the books being "radically experimental in form". The New Yorker found The Rags of Time to be lacking in substance, while Publishers Weekly thought some characters in The Silver Screen were under-developed. Reviewing Big as Life in The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Potts argued that "Howard's style can sometimes be too elliptical for its own good", although he still found the book to be full of "subtlety and grace". Reviewing The Rags of Time in The New York Times, the author Jess Row admired Howard's writing and the "extremely ambitious" end to her quartet.

Personal life

Howard's brother, George Kearns, was a professor of literature who authored two books on Ezra Pound; he was Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. Howard's daughter, Loretta Howard, owns an art gallery in New York City. Howard died in Manhattan on March 13, 2022, at the age of 91.

Selected bibliography

Novels

  • Not a Word About Nightingales. Secker & Warburg, 1960.
  • Bridgeport Bus. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.
  • Before My Time. Little, Brown & Co., 1974.
  • Grace Abounding. Little, Brown & Co., 1982.
  • Expensive Habits. Summit Books, 1986.
  • Natural History. W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
  • A Lover’s Almanac. Viking, 1998.
  • The Silver Screen. Viking, 2004.
  • The Rags of Time. Viking, 2009.

    Story collection

  • Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring. Viking, 2001.

    Nonfiction

  • Facts of Life. Little, Brown & Co., 1978.

    Edited volumes

  • Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
  • The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays. Viking, 1985.
  • Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1891-1910. Library of America, 2001.
  • Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911-1937. Library of America, 2001.